The Trade-off Effects between MLU and Fluency in Normal Preschool-age Children

발화길이와 유창성 간의 교환효과: 언어 발달시기에 있는 36-48 개월의 정상아동을 대상으로

The limited capacity model has been used to explain linguistic interactions and trade-offs that occur in children's speech. The purpose of the present investigation is to explore the interrelationship of MLU (as an index of syntactic development) and fluency in the spontaneous speech of normal children. Twenty normal children's (ten girls and ten boys, aged 36-48 months) spontaneous speech samples were obtained during free-play interactions with their mothers or other adults. The results indicated that the MLU of disfluent utterances were significantly longer than that of fluent utterances. Also, disfluencies occurred more frequently in longer utterances than in shorter utterances. In addition, the utterances where disfluencies occurred more than 2 times were longer than those where disfluencies occurred once. These results imply that the increase of MLU appear to affect not only the occurrence of disfluent utterances, but also the number of disfluencies within the utterances. In other' words, these findings show that there are trade-off effects between MLU and fluency. This is discussed within a limited capacity framework.